Originally Posted by hesnotthemessia 
Hello there everyone
.
Hello
I tried using this PC as my main DAW over the last few days but it now coughs and splutters when I use the Sonic Core and Powercore cards in it. Having taken out the Fronier Design cards and replacing them with the Sonic Core cards I have come to the conclusion that I don't think it can handle the extra activity on its PCI busses that the Sonic Core creates. From what I have read on the net the PC Chips P23G motherboard this PC uses is rather useless.
You don't mention if that board has been loaded with ddr 1 or ddr 2 memory. Your right on what you say through, the specs don't read as particularly pleasant to work with and being a hybrid board I don't imagine you have enough bandwidth at all to cope with the amount of data your transferring around the system. You may actually see a large improvement by fitting a better board to that machine with some faster memory if you fancy reusing some of those parts at a later date.
There are various other reasons for changing my setup which I won't go into here (unless you want me to!)
If it's relevant, please do. Always handy to know the background info as it can help shape the system knowing how it's going to be used.
I would like to be able to use the Magma Chasis in one of the PCI slots. The Magma Chasis will house 2 or 3 Powercore cards and 4 UAD1 cards. I would like to use one of the PCIE slots for the Sonic Core Xite which is a sound card/DSP card. I may get a UAD Quad card, in which case I would then remove all but one of the UAD1 cards from the Magma Chasis. This would allow me to use the plugins authorised for the UAD1 card on the Quad card. How I place the PCI cards will depend on the IRQ settings - it might be better if I placed certain cards in any free PCI slot rather than in the Magma Chasis. Can Scan provide details of the IRQ settings for the PCI/PCIE slots?
Windows since XP (maybe even 98M.E.) has been assigning IRQ's itself so bios assignments are not really that relevant. I can grab a screen shot later on when one goes onto software with the standard assignments that it dishes out but I'm not sure if this will be too helpful. Devices ship with a few different IRQ settings in the hardware and they'll choose whichever one is free and relevant at the time of install thus if you have a device in there that takes priority then the IRQ list I give you now will be invalid.
Slot wise you need a minimum of 1 x pci for the magma and 2 x pcix for the sonic xite and uad quad if you go for it. I'm thinking the UD4P or UD5 maybe better choices for reasons i'll go over below.
NVIDIA Graphics: 512MB Palit 9500GT 550MHz GPU 32 Cores 800MHz GDDR2
Not sure about which graphics card to go for and I could really do with some help here. I currently use two Acer AL2416W 24inch analogue (DSub) monitors. Ideally I would to be able to use 3 lots of 24" monitors so that I could view my Sonic Core stuff (mixer and routing area) on one screen and Cubase5 (getting today hopefully) over two screens. But I don't think this is possible with any of the graphics cards Scan can supply. I may have to stick with using two monitors and maybe save up for two larger screens in the future (man, this redundancy money is going fast.........I am going to have to find a new job pretty quick at this rate! All this lovely gear
but no time to use it then!
) Plus, with my heavy use of DSP cards, I don't want my graphics card hogging the PCI/PCIE busses (should this be a concern?). One other concern is that I don't want to be prevented from being able to use one of the PCIE slots because the graphics card blocks it. Could this be a problem?
One of the reasons audio p.c's use low spec cards is so they don't hog the bandwidth. Long as you stay low end you'll be fine. If you want to go 3 screens you have a couple of options.
The first option is fit two video cards. Windows will use whatever ports it has access too so you could add in a pair of video cards and have upto 4 displays. As a side note if you had monitors with hdmi you could in theory run 6 as the's a few cards (including ones for under £40) that have dsub/dvi/hdmi. I've seen someone running a 32" tv as his main screen (cubase monitor) with a pair of 24"'s below it (sample editing & vsti's).
The only issue here is that using passive cards will block up the slot underneath which makes configuration hard enough with just one card in there, let alone two.
The second if space is at a premium inside the machine is a video signal splitter.
The's two options here as any card you go for will have the option of 2 monitors on the outputs (dsub & dvi (which can be converted to a second dsub) so you could add a duel head splitter and still run a 3rd monitor off the card.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Matro...C-and-Notebook
That option uses the power of the video card to handle the signal and is more common for gaming set ups as it's the most powerful option for handling video in this fashion.
The's also (and this is the cheapest option I think) usb monitor outputs. These have a small on board chip to handle the gfx (think something along the lines of the onboard intel solutions in a box) and should be fine for any 2d applications.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=854534
Full selection:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=1-0-4-397-0 (last 4 items)
If you go for the two card option the ud4p and the ud5 are the best options. One problem with the gigabyte range is that the pcix x1 on all of them has a heatsink nearby that will make it useless for a uad quad. With those two boards at least you have a 3 pcix gfx slot you can use for the UAD.
If you go with a single gfx card and duel head/usb monitor output then going with either board is fine but the ud4 will handle 2 more pcix cards and still give you an extra pci slot to squeeze another of your older cards in.
The biggest issue i think is finding you a suitable gfx card. Most passives take up more than one slot. Looking at what's about we have these now
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/256MB...D-Sub-DVI-HDMI which take up a single slot (through clearance is tight with the card next to them). Might be worth trying one of these with an spliter or you may even be able to fit two in with your cards. With the not being much clearance it may come down to how much heat the rest of the cards give off, but it well be a workable solution.